The Last of an Age

In The Last of an Age, Sooyong Kim explores the relationship between social change and the development of an Ottoman literary canon in the course of the sixteenth century by examining the work and reception of a popular poet, Zati (1471-1546). Kim argues that a newly emergent group of bureaucratic literati, through the production of authoritative biographical dictionaries, ultimately relegated Zati to a lesser literary age, driven by a self-fashioning that privileged broad linguistic ability, above all else, with poetry serving as the main vehicle for demonstrating that. This study is interdisciplinary in approach, taking insights from literary studies, cultural history, and social theory. It adds to the scholarship on the rise of early modern Ottoman canons in the fields of visual arts and music and complements recent work on court patronage. Framed by ongoing critiques of canon formation among specialists of early modern Europe and late imperial China, the study offers a comparative perspective on those issues.

Sooyong Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Comparative Literature at Koç University, Istanbul.

Introduction 1. Contexts: The Court and Beyond 1.1 The Court and Poetry 1.2 State, Society, and the Ottoman Way 1.3 The Social Spread of Poetry 1.4 The Matter of Poetic Training 2. A Poet in Istanbul 2.1 The New Cultural Capital 2.2 The Early Years 2.3 The Later Years 2.4 On Patronage 3. A Poet and His Work 3.1 The Remarkable Lyricist 3.2 Varieties of Convention, Questions of Audience 3.3 Of (Qualified) Praise 4. An Emerging Tradition 4.1 The Issue of Influence 4.2 Refashioning Familiar Poetry 4.3 Eastward Back 4.4 The Plain Turkish Movement Reconsidered 5 The Making of a Legacy 5.1 Mentor at Large 5.2 Zati and Baki 5.3 Linguistic Identity and Cultural Difference 5.4 A Poet Caught in Transition Epilogue